FRETLESSLY is an electric-bass instructional site with a few good ideas to present and a lot of instructional material to bring together, in the form of transcriptions, videos, lessons, and reviews.

We also have our own walking-bass study manual, 23 pages, entitled

A POCKET GUIDE TO WALKING-BASS MOVES

available here for $2.99. It’s a series of ten “bridge” lessons to help intermediate players with this all-important technique.

Supplementary Exercises

One of the topics covered in A Pocket Guide is the practice of preparing walking lines and solo ideas in advance ― as a way to negotiate particular, difficult passages or chord progressions, or to prep entire choruses. Or to deal with any weak spots in your technique.

You can also surprise the hell out of your bandmates if you suddenly start driving confidently ― and inventively ― through a thorny set of changes or a tricky turnaround that until then always sounded unclear, tentative, or lagging.

You build up this “playbook” by working out your own lines, by lifting ideas from other soloists, and by learning the actual bass lines used in recordings or transcriptions.

Your thinking should be that nobody has a monopoly on ideas; other soloists’ ideas will likely be better than your own, or at least push you in new directions and new fingerings . . .

The physical act of playing segments of horn or guitar solos will put the muscle memory to work, and as you internalize the moves, their lines ― the soloists’ ― become your lines.

And when you write out your own ideas, with practice they can be tweaked to be a little bit more advanced for the current level of your technique ― or little advances on your technique ―which will be offset by the fact that you’ll be reading them or will have memorized them.

Here we illustrate a few ways to develop prefab phrases: three lessons intended as supplements to the material in A Pocket Guide.